PRINCIPAL & LEADERSHIP

Ronald Alfred Windmill was born in 1927 and represented a generation in which technical competence, public service, intellectual curiosity and practical self-reliance were closely connected.

He served in the Royal Air Force and spent his working career in radar and associated electronic systems. His work progressed from ground-to-air radar to air-to-ground radar and into a succession of related technologies and applications, including the development and use of colour radar imagery. His career therefore ran alongside a formative period in British radar and electronics development, from predominantly military applications into increasingly sophisticated imaging and derivative systems.

Alongside his brother Leonard, Ronald also participated in an employer-sponsored industrial fire brigade associated with the engineering and electronics organisations in which they worked.

In 1953 he married Patricia “Pat” Bacon, joining the Windmill and Bacon family lines. They had three children: Steven, Caron and Debbie.

Ronald was an exceptionally persistent reader. He would read virtually any book available to him in English and regarded newspapers largely as a substitute when no book was to hand. Reading was not treated as a pastime separate from life, but as a continuing means of understanding the world.

He retained the same practical energy physically. He remained exceptionally fit and active into later life; shortly before his death he was still climbing trees and carrying out demanding work around his home. That combination of intellectual curiosity, physical capability and reluctance to regard age as a reason for inactivity was characteristic of him.

Within the family, Ronald was remembered particularly through standards of conduct rather than formal doctrine: do the work, keep one’s word, retain humility and look after the family quietly over time. Those principles were reconstructed in 2026 by Leonard George Windmill and Steven Michael Windmill as A Father’s Code, explicitly as remembered family teaching rather than as a recovered historical document.

“Give your word sparingly; once given, keep it.”

Ronald Alfred Windmill — A Father’s Code / A Knight’s Oath

Ronald served as Honorary Chairman within the family stewardship arrangements preceding the formal incorporation of Windmill Family Office Ltd. His contribution is retained within the Office as part of the continuity between inherited family practice and its present institutional form.

Alfred Charles Windmill was one of the principal entrepreneurial figures in the twentieth-century development of the family.

He entered the glass trade at the age of thirteen in 1915. By 1919, while still a teenager, he was supervising men returning to civilian employment after service in the First World War. By 1924 he was running a glass and mirror-making business in Clerkenwell, London.

His early commercial progress was accompanied by an equally early lesson in institutional access. In 1923, when he first attempted to open a bank account, he was initially turned away. The position changed when bank staff realised that the two businessmen accompanying him were already respected customers and were prepared to act as his references. Family memory preserves the additional detail that the two Rolls-Royces outside the bank belonged to them. The episode became an early example of the importance of reputation, sponsorship and trusted relationships in gaining access to institutions.

Alfred later became involved in organising workers across the London trade. He did not treat workforce interests and commercial performance as inherently opposed. Instead, he demonstrated to employers that better treatment of staff could improve productivity. The same two businessmen who had earlier vouched for him at the bank later helped fund the wider union initiative after he had persuaded them of the commercial value of that approach.

Over time, Alfred accumulated interests beyond the glass trade. He came to own a number of corner shops in North London, including Enfield and Wood Green, and in Hertfordshire, including Kings Langley. His career therefore combined operating management, labour organisation, banking relationships, entrepreneurship and direct ownership.

As a young man he also briefly entered the Royal Navy, before his mother secured his return when it was discovered that he was underage.

Alfred’s significance within the family lies less in any single enterprise than in the breadth of his activity and the way he moved between apparently different worlds: employer and workforce, banking and entrepreneurship, operating businesses and asset ownership. He appears to have understood early that commercial performance depended not only upon Capital, but upon people, reputation, relationships and institutional confidence.

That combination of practical judgement, enterprise and relational credibility became an important part of the family’s later stewardship tradition.

He subsequently served as Honorary Chairman within the family stewardship arrangements that preceded the modern Windmill Family Office.